Fade Away
by PropernameSurname
Summary: Novel-Verse One-Shot. Spoilers for all three novels, but if you don't plan on reading them or are just darn confused-what's with those movie titles?-I'd recommend this. Basically it explores Bourne's past through his POV.


_A/N:_ _Okay, so, this is my first FanFiction ever, and I hope you all enjoy it! It's main purpose was to establish me as an author here (let everyone get a sample of my style of writing) and answer some questions I've noticed arise due to the differences between the stories and the movies. So, here goes nothing! I hope you have fun with this, because I sure did!_

Disclaimer: Doesn't it go without saying? But just to please: I don't own any of this. Thank Ludlum; he's the genius.

--x--

I get these nightmares.

I lay here next to my wife, my Marie, the children asleep in their rooms. I have a wonderful family, a great job. I'm living a life that would have made the man I used to be proud.

But I still can't escape my mistakes.

The window is open. I can hear the murmur of the restless ocean beyond the wooden sill. It keeps me company, in a way. The waves fight as aimlessly as I. I'm lost, wandering frantically. I'm not even at home in the arms of my lover.

Love…

It hurts to think about love.

I loved before, so long ago, when I was young and naïve and perfectly content.

I had a life, in a place across those stormy waters. I had a family that meant more than anything to me. I had a _future, _bright and full of possibility, that could have taken me anywhere.

But it was all taken from me.

And _I_ let it happen.

David Webb was the victim of a pointless war, an idiotic dispute, an impossible mistake…

An unimaginable grief.

The incident haunts my past. It stretches its sickly fingers into my future. It compresses my heart and makes my head spin. That single second in time changed the course of my life forever. It killed an innocent man and created a monster.

I didn't have any idea what was coming when I went off to my meeting that day. I was unsuspecting, secure in my ignorance.

God, I can still see their faces, hear their voices and delighted laughs, feel them beside me even when I'm completely alone. I loved them, God, did I ever love them. And I never even got to say goodbye…

They say ignorance is bliss.

They're wrong.

Ignorance is death.

And imagine how that ignorance evaporated when I discovered that an enemy plane had murdered my wife and two young children.

Imagine the disgust, the distress, the acrid taste of failure that nearly killed me as the sight of their bodies on the riverbank met my eyes.

The only thing to do was scream.

Dao, Joshua, Alyssa…they put their trust, their faith, in me. And I failed them.

I wanted to die.

But Alex Conklin, a friend, offered me something else:

Revenge.

The very meaning my shredded life sought was revenge.

I didn't know it was a lie, a ruse.

They gave me a clean slate, a fresh start, and a deadly skill.

They taught me to kill, and they let the rage in my still grieving heart do the rest.

I didn't have a name. None of us did.

We didn't need names.

They said it was because we were covert, because we didn't exist.

It was really because names were too painful.

Our names were synonymous with our pasts, and we all wanted to forget.

And the more hurt I felt, the more terrifying I became.

I was Delta, of Medusa.

There wasn't a man on the face of the Earth that didn't cringe at my reputation.

My victims feared me.

My colleagues feared me.

My _creators_ feared me.

And the reason I kept on killing was because I wanted to die.

I wanted to fail, to botch a mission, to make another fatal mistake and lose my _own_ life that time around.

But I never did.

I just got stronger, colder, darker.

And I was utterly alone.

Then the day came when they found a new use for me.

The war was over, Medusa was finished, but I was too valuable a resource to toss aside with the rest.

So I became Cain.

There was a killer, you see, in Europe. Carlos the Jackal was his name. The most feared and merciless man on Earth. They needed to end his reign, in essence.

And that was where _I_ came in.

Cain replaces "Charlie" in the military alphabet…Charles is short for Charlie…Carlos is the Spanish equivalent of Charles…it was a quiet, coded message, but it was received.

Cain was to replace the Jackal, was to reign supreme.

But they needed a name to pass around.

A name to attach a horrifying, fabricated past to.

There was a man I once knew, a traitor.

He died in the jungle by my hand, was left to rot unremembered.

His name was Jason Bourne.

Heavens knew _he_ didn't need the name, so I borrowed it.

And the Bourne identity was created.

I had one purpose: to kill the Jackal.

I came close several times, but I only achieved it after many years of strife.

A problem came up, you see.

I lost my memory.

Getting shot in the head will do that to you.

With the help of my beloved Marie, I've gotten most of it back, but there are still some lost fragments that I can't salvage.

Sometimes they bite my sleep and bleed into my dreams, leaving me to wake in a cold sweat, confused, disoriented, and terribly alone once more.

Terribly _afraid_.

I completed my mission.

I came through for my creators.

I avenged my past.

And yet I'm afraid.

I have a million names, a trillion identities.

I'm Delta, I'm Cain, I'm Jason Bourne, I'm The Chameleon, I'm David Webb…

But I still don't know who I am.

It's quite possible I never will.

I lay here next to my wife (my second, and she knows it), drinking in the darkness and the grieving rush of the waves.

It'll be dawn in about five hours; the sun will poke up over the horizon, my family will wake, I'll head off to my job at the university, and I'll wait for the next part of my life to seize me in its wake. I don't know exactly where I'm going. I don't really care.

For now, all I want to do, all I _can_ do, is lay here.

Waiting for the blackness to claim me, for the nightmares to return.

I'm love, I'm hate, I'm the epitome of goodness and the face of evil.

I'm not sure if I can ever regain what I lost, what was taken from me.

What _I _let die.

My eyelids grow heavy with the pain of remembrance-

The sweep of the apathetic ocean dims-

The dark night seeps into my heart-

And everything fades away…

--x--

_A/N: Here's some info to straighten out several confusions my story may have caused. Hope this all helps! : D_

_This fact is where the title for the first book (and movie) comes from. The Bourne identity was created as a rumor to unnerve the Jackal and prepare Webb to eliminate him. The name "Jason Bourne" was taken from a traitor that David Webb executed when he was posted in Vietnam._

_In __The Bourne Ultimatum, Jason's "ultimatum", if you will, is that he will kill the Jackal, and finally succeeds, after several confrontations in the other books. This title is confusing for moviegoers because the Jackal was taken out of the story for the movies. Therefore there really isn't any reason to the title for the movie; the basis is all in the book._

_In the movie Jason is shot in the back and the reason for his memory loss is his conscience acting up; in the novel, however, a gunshot wound to the head is the reason for Bourne's loss of memory._

_In the novel, Marie does not die (until __The Bourne Betrayal, which is the fifth book and a continuation of Ludlum's original trilogy, but is irrelevant to this point), and on one occasion tells Webb she wants him to remember his old family and that she will love their memory as much as he does._

_Just another little point, as I noticed some confusion about the movie titles when I was surfing the web one time, is that the title for __The Bourne Supremacy comes from the fact that, in the novel, Marie is kidnapped after Jason is framed by an impostor for the murder of several important Chinese figures. The impostor (created by Bourne's old comrade from Medusa, Echo) begins murdering in Bourne's name, and Bourne, the __real Bourne, must stop him and prove the original is supreme in order to get Marie back. That's the whole idea behind the supremacy part of the title, which is obviously lost in the movie. I've already explained the other two, so hopefully this sheds a little light on an extremely confusing issue. Really the best thing to do if you're a hopeless movie fan and care nothing for the books is to ignore the titles and treat the movies as a separate entity from the novels. I'd be glad to straighten out any questions you may have, if I can! I hope you enjoyed the story! See y'all in the future!_


End file.
